Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

I remember starting to read this book back in my teens or early twenties. I was reading many of the big mid-century authors: Updike, Cheever, Philip Roth’s early novels. I didn’t got very far with Henderson the Rain King and I ended up never reading any Saul Bellow. But, of course, Bellow is a major twentieth century author, National Book Award winner, Pulitzer Prize winner, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, so I knew at some point I should try again. Then this novel showed up in the free book bin at the coffee house so I picked it up.

This time, I loved it. My problem, I believe, as a young man, was that the protagonist is a middle-aged man with extravagant middle-aged problems. He’s twice married. He has several children. He’s restless and unsatisfied. His life is chaotic. He searches madly for fulfillment of some non-specific psychic ache. He hears an inner voice constantly repeating, “I want, I want, I want.” I thought, based on the title and what little I knew of the story, that the book would be an adventure story of a man in Africa. It does eventually get there, but the first forty of so pages are setting up this character and his life-story. It was too much for me. I couldn’t relate and grew impatient and gave up.

Though Eugene Henderson is still very unlike me, at this time of life, I understand him more. I’m now older than his fifty-six years. Instead of judging his crisis as unserious and weak, I now sympathize and see both the pain and the humor in his situation.

And most of all, I instantly loved Bellow’s story-telling and language. The novel is abundant. It’s a straightforward hero’s journey of a man on a quest, encountering trials, and returning transformed, but it’s surrounded by a very full life, and told with writerly abandon. It’s fun. Bellow seems free to follow any path his prose takes him so the story accumulates fanciful and outrageous incidents, like a whale collects barnacles. Henderson and the novel share the same character, he’s physically big, he blunders through life, and he talks in a unique combination of erudition and slang. He’s a strange, flawed, honest, self-deprecating, but eventually admirable guy. I wouldn’t like him in real life, I don’t think, but I like him in the novel. The reader roots for him.

Henderson is a World War II vet. He has inherited wealth, so he doesn’t need to work. He careens restlessly through life. He plays the violin. He raises pigs. He deals badly with his wives and children and neighbors. I found this opening section that I found uncouth as a young adult to be highly entertaining this time.

And then he has a chance to go to Africa when a photographer friend traveling on his honeymoon invites Henderson to go along. In Africa (a entirely fictional, fairy-tale Africa), Henderson quickly splits with his friend and hires a guide, Romilayu, to take him off alone. Where Hemingway’s men go to Africa to assert themselves, Henderson goes to find himself.

The African adventure comes in two parts. First he encounters a tribe called the Arnewi lead by a king named Itelo who attended a western school in Syria and speaks English. The Arnewi are suffering from a drought and the only source of water, a cistern, is contaminated by frogs which they cannot clear due to superstition. Henderson decides he can help by using explosives to blow out the frogs by when he does so he also blows a hole in the cistern itself and loses all the water. In disgrace, Henderson and Romilayu hike away.

The second adventure is with a tribe called the Wariri led by a King Dahfu who attended the same school with Itelo. Henderson becomes the Rain King when he participates in a rain-making ceremony and is the only man strong enough to lift a statue of the rain goddess Mummah and carry her across the ceremonial grounds.

Henderson and Dahfu become friends and philosophize about life together. Henderson admires Dahfu and thinks that he can learn from him. Dahfu introduces Henderson to a lion that he captured and keeps in a pen beneath the palace. Dahfu encourages Henderson to develop his own lion nature. Dahfu also explains that the tribe believes that when a king dies, his spirit transfers to a lion cub and the next king must capture that lion in order to receive the royal spirit. The former king, Dahfu’s father, died a few years earlier, and Dahfu hasn’t performed this duty yet. It concerns the tribe that Dahfu is consorting with this other lion and suspect that he may not be up to the task of being king.

Then comes the lion hunt. Scouts identify the kingly lion and force him toward a trap. Dahfu must do the actual capture. Dahfu brings Henderson along. But Dahfu fails to trap the lion, and is mortally wounded. It wasn’t the correct lion in any case. Henderson discovers the proper lion cub had already been captured and hidden away. As Dahfu dies without an heir, Henderson learns that he, the Rain King, is next in line, and he realizes that his entire adventure with the Wariri was a set-up. They deliberately sized up Henderson’s strength. The tribesmen let Henderson move the statue so Henderson would become the rain king. They sabotaged the lion trap so that Dahfu would fail. Becoming wise to the plot and with no interest in being king, Henderson and Romilayu steal away with Henderson taking the lion cub along with them.

They make it back to civilization. The novel takes only a few final pages for Henderson to recover his strength and fly back home bringing the lion with him. The book ends with Henderson’s plane stopping for refueling in Newfoundland, not quite reaching home or reconciling with his family and somewhat ambiguous about whether he’s really found what he went looking for on his adventure, but a sense of optimism and he has the lion cub with him.

It’s an unruly book. It’s comic but it also says serious things about finding purpose in life. The incidents are sometimes silly but weighted with symbolic weight. (A lion kept in the dark basement of a palace – come on!). The rambunctious writing is the best part.

When Jim saw the book lying on the coffee table he told me that Joni Mitchell found her inspiration for the song “Both Sides Now” in a passage about clouds in this book. So I was on the lookout. Here it is:

“Africa reached my feelings right away even in the air, from which it looked like the ancient bed of mankind. And at a height of three miles, sitting above the clouds, I felt like an airborne seed. From the cracks in the earth the rivers pinched back at the sun. They shone out like smelter’s puddles, and then they took a crust and were covered over. As for the vegetable kingdom, it hardly existed from the air; it looked to me no more than an inch in height. And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily” (p. 42).

Bellow actual mediates on this cloud vision three times in the novel. Much later, among the Wariri, he writes a letter to his wife back home, intending to send Romilayu with it, where he retells the whole of his adventure so far. He writes to her, “We are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides. What a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and downward. This is bound to change something, somewhere” (p. 280).

And then on the flight back home, over the Atlantic: “I couldn’t get enough of the water, and of these upside-down sierras of the clouds. Like courts of eternal heaven. (Only they aren’t eternal, that’s the whole thing; they are seen once and never seen again, being figures and not abiding realities…)” (p. 333)

Having rediscovered Bellow after all these years and at last appreciating him, I’m looking forward to tackling the rest of his novels.